Spring is the season of renewal. That renewal can include cleaning and decluttering.
While not everyone with an overabundance of stuff is a hoarder, it can take a physical and mental toll on our lives and loved ones.
On this hour of All Sides, we’re talking about how to declutter and organize.
Guests:
- Mary E. Dozier, associate professor, department of psychology, Mississippi State University
- Dana K. White, decluttering expert
Transcript
This transcript is generated with AI. To ensure its accuracy, review the audio file.
Amy Juravich: Welcome to All Sides with Amy Juravich. Spring is the season of renewal. That renewal can include cleaning and decluttering. One of the benefits of the pandemic was the interest people gained in purging items that had been collecting in attics, basements, closets, and garages. While not everyone with an overabundance of stuff is necessarily someone with a hoarding disorder, clutter can take a physical and emotional toll on people. Our look at spring cleaning this hour begins with Mary E. Dozier, Associate Professor in the Department of Psychology at Mississippi State University. She studies hoarding with a specialization in intervention to help older adults with hoarding problems. Welcome to All Sides, Mary.
Mary E. Dozier: Thank you so much for having me. And I just wanted to start with the word hoarder. I know that that word can be a loaded term.
Juravich: In the introduction, I just said people with a hoarding disorder. Can you tell me why saying hoarder is maybe not completely accurate?
Dozier: Absolutely. And I'm going to give full credit to the American Psychological Association that if folks are interested in learning more about bias-free language, they have some great resources out there. But part of why for hoarding, it's specifically extra important is that there's so much stigma related to hoarding. And so I think when people use the word hoarder, it's similar to if you were to call someone an addict, that it has this language where we're labeling the person as their problem versus saying, We have a person and they have some problems that they're dealing with, but it's not their entire personality.
Juravich: Okay, so some people think that hoarding is just a lack of discipline. But tell me about the psychological component because there's a psychological component there with people's connection to items. Tell me about that.
Dozier: Yes, and what we see with hoarding is that there's both often an attachment to the items themselves. So we call it anthropomorphization. So seeing items more as people. But also, oftentimes, folks with hoard problems will relate the item to having it be synonymous with maybe the person who gave it to them or the person was part of the memory with it. So thinking about not being able to get rid of a book because your mother gave it you. And so it feels like getting rid of that book would be like getting rid of your mother. And then other psychological aspects to it are something we call executive functioning. So, which has to do with your ability to make decisions. So oftentimes folks with hoarding problems just really struggle with the ability to think through the pros and cons of keeping versus discarding an item.
Juravich: Are there different levels of clutter in terms whenever someone is just messy versus being actually diagnosed with a hoarding disorder? Where's the level? Do you see it? How do you know it?
Dozier: Yeah, and that's such a great question because I think there's always trends and, you know, from minimalism to cottage core, is that still a thing? And I think what where hoarding disorder really comes into play is when you think about dysfunction. So distress and dysfunction is what always separates out. To some symptoms from having a full disorder. And so where things become dysfunctional is gonna depend on the person. So the same amount of clutter might be functional for one person who can still navigate around it versus could be really dysfunctional for say an older adult who maybe has less mobility and has just more difficulty getting through their space.
Juravich: Well, you specialize in helping older adults with hoarding problems. Is, is this typically something that they've collected their entire life, like decades and decades of stuff, or do they sometimes start it at an older age? Tell me about that.
Dozier: What we normally see is that older adults will say that they've started collecting things or just acquiring things in their adolescence and teens, and then it just sort of steadily increased over time with kind of two big kind of turning points. One is when you gain independence on your space, right? So when you think as a kid, you might have had a messy room, but your mom could come in and soothe every single way. And then when you go out on your own, suddenly you're able to control that space and things can start to creep up. And then also generally folks in a later middle aged or early adulthood, when they're losing their own parents, all of a sudden have this influx in objects that have all this emotional attachment that they're having to go through, while also dealing with perhaps the clutter left over from their own children who moved out, but left, you know, shrines in their bedrooms to their childhood.
Juravich: What interventions do you recommend whenever you're working with people who have hoarding disorder? Where's the best place to start?
Dozier: Yeah, if you're, if folks are looking for some self-help or there's some great peer-led groups out there usually using a book called "Buried in Treasures." I'd also recommend the International OCD Foundation. IOCDF has some great resources on its website of how to find a therapist. But if you're just looking to kind of be reflective yourself of how is my clutter impacting me, one of the things I always recommend for folks is to start with thinking about your values of what's, you know, don't think about your items to begin with, think about what's truly important to you. How do you want to be living your life and then start thinking about how do you want to use your space? And having that as your framework for when you start to go through that clutter of not thinking does each item necessarily spark joy, but does it serve my value? So what's its purpose here in my home and in my life?
Juravich: You mentioned OCD, obsessive-compulsive disorder, is that connected with hoarding?
Dozier: This is probably its whole episode, but there's this really fascinating history of the relationship between OCD and hoarding. And part of it is that hoarding problems were originally thought of as a symptom of OCD, but mostly because it was included in one assessment we call the Y-Box. That's just this checklist of O CD problems. And one of them was hoarding, but hoarding in an OCD. Often looks very different from what we think of as hoarding disorder, that hoarding disorder symptoms actually look more similar to OCPD, obsessive-compulsive personality disorder that's characterized by perfectionism. So what we see is that folks with hoarding disorder that have sort of this OCPD bent, a lot of the hoarding is linked with I am. Kind of rigid thoughts about how they want their items to be used or how they could let their items be discarded. So kind of back to that executive functioning component of one of the things we often see is folks with hoarding will say, you know, I could get rid of this, but it has to happen in this very particular way that I'm holding on to these things until I find you know somebody who can appreciate the item and use it how I would like for it to be
Juravich: This is All Sides on 89.7 NPR News. We're talking about America's clutter problems with Mary E. Dozier, Associate Professor in the Department of Psychology at Mississippi State University. I have to ask because I think most people, when they think about people with a hoarding disorder, the TV show "Hoarders" immediately comes to mind. And so that's what they see, that's they know, because it was a TV show and it was popular for a time. Do you have a? Do you hate the show? Do you have a mixed relationship with the show, what are your thoughts on the show.
Dozier: I would say definitely a mixed relationship, because I think it got hoarding into the zeitgeist, or it made people think about it, but also in this highly stigmatizing, very otherizing way, right? So what I often see when I am, I just recently finished a clinical trial, and when I was recruiting for it, I would have folks come up to me and say, you know, I'm really struggling with clutter. It's not serving me, it's getting in the way of my life. But I'm not one of those people. I don't look like the show. That people would say, I don't look like this show so often. But I think for me, what it portrays hoarding, it's almost as if we only talked about depression as suicide, right? Of that far extreme. And that, yes, major depressive disorder can lead to suicide in the same way that hoarding disorder can lead to this house is completely filled. But we want to start intervening earlier than that, right? That we want folks to feel comfortable reaching out and asking for help before it gets to that.
Juravich: I know you specialize in intervention to help older adults. I would think that at some point, the older adult would just be overwhelmed by everything and just say, I'm going to leave it to be someone else's problem, which is sad and has a whole lot of things to it. But how do we change that mindset? Or is that the end answer for some people, that they're going to leave it be someone's else's problems?
Dozier: I feel like you were reading my mind of that I actually one of the anecdotes I often use is I was in a woman's home and she was telling me that, you know, she saw how it wasn't functional, how she couldn't use her space and she said, but I'm just going to leave it for my daughter when I die. And her daughter was literally sitting right there of just to kind of show that her full mindset of being like, I'm comfortable at not being my problem anymore. But I do think it's. Well, what do we do?
Juravich: What do I do? What did the daughter look to you and what did you say?
Dozier: Well, at first, I was like, oh. But when we talked about it, we talked to how do you want to let out the rest of your life? Because in other words, you're feeling overwhelmed. But I think so often, people get to this point where they say, it's too far gone. There's no going back. There's not hope. There's nowhere I'm ever going to conquer this. And I think because so often we look at problems and we think, can I conquer this in a day? And if not, what does that mean? Is it worth? What would that look like? And the truth is you're not going to conquer it in a day, but we can make a plan to kind of conquer a little bit at a time, just start to take back parts of your home. And so you really talked through of, you're not dying today, you not dying tomorrow. What do you want to use your home for in this time that you do have, right? And kind of circling it back to those values. And I always think having people bring in their own values into their space helps them really concentrate on the clutter. So thinking about, OK. I get that right now it feels overwhelming, but I know one of the things we talked about is you want to see your grandkids more, right? What would it look like to even just start focusing on the kitchen counters so y'all can start baking cookies together, right, of like starting small and letting it kind of ripple out from.
Juravich: As generations change, so do the relationship to family heirlooms and what we hang on to. So boomers may have inherited and passed down items, but millennials and Gen Zers, they value experiences over things. That's what a lot of the research says. So do you see a generational breakdown in your research? Do younger people want less stuff?
Dozier: I think that's such a complicated question. There's so many layers of economics in it. And what I will see is I think two things are happening societally is the younger people are just moving more. I know I've moved across the country like three times now in my career. And so every time I buy something, I think is this worth moving across the county? Is I think something that's a younger mindset we have. And I also think that as one of the like small sociological parts of it is changing gender roles, right? That I, when I have a dinner party, I'm not as worried as say my mother or grandmother was of how people will think about the China pattern, right, that it's not as important to have all of the glasses match of things that kind of the shifting of values for what the whole needs to be. I think I've changed and then changed, you know, how much I want to inherit. Three sets of China from grandparents, and what that means to me, I think, has shifted too. And China is harder to move across the country again.
Juravich: So what do we do with the three sets of China that our parents have, that they are just assuming that you, the younger person, are going to take?
Dozier: I, it's a complicated, because that brings in family dynamics. And so you always want to be careful with that. Cause I don't want to say lie to your mother. Um, but sometimes you do judiciously don't, don't lie to your mother for getting close to mother's day. Um, But sometimes you can judicious tell the truth, right? That you can, if your parents or grandparents are struggling with their own clutter, you can say, yes, let me take this off your hands. You don't have to promise that you're gonna hold onto it for the next 50 years, right? But maybe it gets away that to help your parents or grandparents declutter and then later think through what are the pieces of this you want to hold onto? What are the things that are actually important to you that give you that connection to your family without having to have your closets filled up with plates that you might not use?
Juravich: Um, we recently became aware of a term called aspirational hoarding, which is accumulating items for this futuristic hobby, like a hobby or a lifestyle or something that never materialized. So you were going to be the best scrapbooker on the planet and you have bins and bins of stuff, but you never actually do it. Have you heard of that term aspirational?
Dozier: I haven't heard of the term, but it's something I've seen a lot. But I think it's, I often think of we hold on to things either out of holding onto the memory of who we were or holding on to the hope of who we wanted to be, right, of this sense of identity. If I have all of the things for scrapbooking, I'm going to be the best scrapbooker and that's going to an important part of who I am. And so letting it go is letting go of that dream, of letting go, I'm not going to do that scrapbook.
Juravich: Do you ever recommend people hire, there's services, like cleaning services or decluttering services, you can come in and they can help you. Do you every recommend that or does the person need to do it themselves because the cluttering service will come in but then you'll build it up again.
Dozier: And I think it's important for the person to be the one making the decisions. But I think, especially for older adults who have mobility problems, that having people come in to help. But the logistics of it can be really, really helpful. And there's some great professional organizers out there who actually have had training in evidence-based interventions for hoarding and for things like ADHD that tend to be really co-morbid that can help you kind of get a fresh start. But I think what I would always be wary of is if somebody's coming in and making all those decisions for you, then it's not your space anymore. And it's gonna be sometimes just a... People have forced clean-outs or if it's gotten too high, but what we see is that people just tend to re-clutter. And I think in part, because it's kind of a kinta for an eating disorder. If somebody's been forced to gain weight, you haven't addressed the psychological components, right? That if you haven't t addressed the underlying psychopathology, the problem is still there. You've just kind of covered it up.
Juravich: Do you recommend if you have someone in your family, if someone's listening to this right now, do they need to get their loved one diagnosed as a person with a hoarding disorder? Like, does that help with any like programs or anything, or does it matter about the diagnosis?
Dozier: That is an absolutely wonderful question, and it's gonna depend on your insurance and whether or not you're gonna be using insurance to try to get treatment. So it's something that I would actually, if you're trying to help a loved one get interventions, I would have them talk to their primary care provider, talk to the insurance provider and see kind of what resources are available for them to out in the community and like to make sure that you're getting something that's consistent with your insurance plan.
Juravich: Yeah, well, that just made me think back to us talking about OCD. So if you take a medication for OCD, can that help with the hoarding?
Dozier: There's been mixed evidence for hoarding. I don't think there's currently any FDA-approved medications for hoardings specifically. But what they have found is that SSRIs, selective serotonin reuptake inhibitors, one of the medications often used for OCD, can be helpful. But cognitive behavioral therapy, our behavioral interventions, tend to be our current gold standard. But we find that it's really helping people change their relationship with their items and then change. How they go about their behaviors of sorting and discarding, of creating more of a habit of going through their things, that that's really what's going to make the difference.
Juravich: Well, we are going to transition for the rest of the show to talk about decluttering and kind of like the spring cleaning mode. But what would you recommend to someone who's listening who maybe needs a little bit more than spring cleaning? What is your good place to start? Because you always just have to find a place to star.
Dozier: I recommend starting small, and if you have a loved one that you feel like would be somebody that could be a good body double, like could be there either in person or over the phone while you start to sort through things, that can be a great way to get started in a small way. And then also again, the IOCDF website, it's a great place to find a provider.
Juravich: We've been speaking with Mary E. Dozier, Associate Professor in the Department of Psychology at Mississippi State University. Thank you so much for joining us on All Sides today. Thank you. And coming up, we're gonna talk about decluttering and organizing and where is the best place to put your focus during spring cleaning season. That's when All Sides continues on 89.7 NPR News.
You're listening to All Sides, I'm your host Amy Juravich. They say spring is for fresh starts, but it's hard to move forward when you're buried under the past. Whether it's a few messy drawers or a house full of just-in-case items, the weight of our belongings affects our mental health more than we realize. This hour on All Sides, we are clearing the path and finding the best strategies to finally declutter your life. Joining us now, we have Dana K. White, creator of the No-Mess Decluttering Method and a decluttering expert. Her books include "Organizing for the Rest of Us" and the Wall Street Journal bestseller "Decluttering at the Speed of Life." Dana shares realistic home management strategies and a message of hope for the hopelessly messy. Welcome to All Sides, Dana.
Dana K. White: Thanks so much for having me on.
Juravich: So I wanted to start with your website because I love the name. It's aslobcomesclean.com. How did you come up with that?
White: Well, this all started in 2009 when I was desperate to be a writer, but I felt like I needed to get my house under control first. And so I actually started a practice blog just as a way to learn about blogging. I did not use my real name in the beginning. It was all the secret. I didn't even tell my husband what I was doing because I wanted a way to learn writing and focus on my house because I thought I'm gonna get my house under controlled first and then I'll start writing about other things. And here we are, it's 2026 right now. And I basically learned that first of all, this is a legitimate struggle in my brain that will always be a struggle. There are absolutely solutions and I have found those solutions, but the legitimacy of the struggle is important to accept, right? Like this is, I have a highly creative brain. And I found out that the people who related to what I was writing also have highly creative brains and high levels of creativity go along with clutter. Not that all creative people have clutter, but most people who struggle severely with clutter are highly creative people. And so I realized this was an ongoing thing, but also. Found out that this was the missing piece. What I was learning in the beginning, I didn't teach anything, but people eventually said, please teach us what you're doing as I was just writing about what I was doing. And this was, this was part that nobody was talking about because most people who write about organizing write about it because they enjoy it and they enjoy because it comes naturally to them. And so they couldn't even imagine my starting place where I was. And so I don't teach people how to have a perfectly color coordinated pantry or anything like that, but I can absolutely teach you how to dig your way out of the mess because that's what I did.
Juravich: Yeah, so you say on your website that you offer advice for people who don't love cleaning and organizing, but know it needs to be done. And I'm raising my hand. That's me. So, so what do you tell most people when they feel like their life is out of control with the mess? Where do you tell people to start?
White: So I follow what I call the visibility rule. And this was a rule I came up with for myself because I needed a way to prioritize. My whole house was a disaster. And so I had to have a place to start. And so, I decided to start in the most visible space, meaning the place that people would see when they were coming into my home. The reason why that is so valuable is that if you will start in most visible place, You see? The impact and you experience the impact of the work that you're doing. If it's very normal to start or to be, you know, to think that you need to start on the top shelf of your closet that no one ever sees this really obscure place. But when you do that, you can put all that energy and time into working there. And then your house isn't actually any different. You don't experience the benefit of that. So you can spend an entire day decluttering and your house is still embarrassing and you're scared to open the front door if somebody happens to come by. And that defeats that. It drains all that decluttering energy out. But if you work in a visible space, it makes your life easier to live. You see the impact every time you walk by and it makes you go, oh, that looks amazing, right? And that was worth it. That was worth my time. I'm proud of what I did. And that increases the decluttering energy that you need to keep going. So it's. Produces momentum in a way that starting in an obscure place does not.
Juravich: You have an introductory video with five key tips. I don't know that we'll have time to go over all five, but I wanted to say you start with the dishes. Your number one tip is do your dishes. Tell me why you're focusing on the dishes in the kitchen. So.
White: Know, as I said, when I started in 2009, I did not know what to do. I had read all the books. I loved the parts where they said stuff that made me feel seen. But when it got down to actually doing the work, I was always like, wait, what? Because it usually involved some sort of plan, like a big let's write out everything that we're going to do, and then let's start doing that. And I started with just absolute desperation. And I was like, I don't know what it is. But every time I go to clean my house, I spend hours working on the kitchen first because it just makes sense. You've got to do the kitchen, first. And by the time I'm done with the kitchen then I'm out of energy and I never get to the rest of the house. And then the kitchen just gets bad again. And so then I think I've got get, you know got to get my house clean. I start back in the kitchen. And so I said, I know there are people who when you show up at their house, unexpectedly, their kitchens are not a disaster. And so I was like, I don't know how they do it. Like it must be that they're doing dishes all the time. And, but I said, I'm just gonna, so I just focused on that one task and I did other things as I could, but I was, like, that is the one thing. That one thing changed my home. So I call it dishes math, okay? Dishes math is, it does not work the way that you would think it does. When I was always trying to have a plan, and figure things out before I actually took any action at all, I would go, okay, well, if it takes me five hours to do the dishes after a week of not doing them, obviously it's going to take me at least an hour to do the dishes every day. And I was like, I don't have an hour to do dishes every day who has an hour, but when I did them every day, I realized, Oh, if I do just one day's worth of dishes every day, it only takes about 15 or 20 minutes. So it doesn't follow what I thought it would follow mathematically. But if I skip a day and I have two days worth of dishes, it doesn' take twice the time. It takes an hour now because I've got, it doesn't all fit in the sink. I've gotta rearrange things. It's just a lot more complicated. And if I go three days, now I'm back to hours of spending time on that. And so focusing on this one task. Ended up freeing up a lot of time in my home that I then focused on decluttering. Cause I always say like your habits are important, but equally important is decluttering cause the decluttering makes it so much easier to do the habits, but the habits are the thing that give you the confidence to do the declutter and also maintain any declutter. Progress that you do make.
Juravich: Yeah, another kitchen tip that you have in your in your top five starter tips is you also say to reduce the number of dishes in your life. So you say you make sure that they all fit in your cabinets. So and that seems so logical, but I do understand what you mean because tell tell us more about that. If you have too much stuff then when it's always dirty you don't notice, I guess.
White: Well, right. I mean, I always thought I needed more dishes because I was always running out of dishes because I would put off doing the dishes because I wasn't overwhelmed, but then I would get more dishes and then I could go longer and I was more overwhelmed and I put it off longer and it was this really bad cycle, right? When I would actually get all the dishes done, I didn't really have enough room in my cabinets for them. And I call this the container concept, okay? The container concept was this realization that I had that I have always thought of containers as places to put things. And so I would fill a space, a kitchen cabinet, a basket, a bin, whatever, and I would have more stuff than would fit in that space. And so my logical, know, assumption was that that meant I needed another cabinet or another dish or build a bookshelf or add a room to my house, right? Well, I didn't have the room. I mean, didn't have the money to remodel my house. And so then I thought I was hopeless. I was like, why is this so hard? When I realized that the purpose of a container is to contain, like actually serve as a limit, be a boundary, it changed how I saw everything in my home. And I realized, oh, every space. Every physical space is a natural limit. It's a boundary. And when I viewed it that way, I didn't look at my dishes as which ones are good, which ones do I love, which ones, you know, oh, I need them all because I'm always running out. Instead, I said, this is the space I have. So if my house was ever to actually be under control, I could only have the dishes that fit functionally in this space. And when I looked at it that way, then I put my favorite ones in, and then I was able to let the others go. And because I had been doing the dishes consistently, I knew which ones were my favorites. I never knew that before, because I was always using up every single dish in my house before I started doing them. But once I was doing them every day, I realized, oh, I gravitate toward these plates first, or this is the mug that if they're all clean, I'm always gonna choose this mug. And so it gave me that freedom to realize, oh, these are the things I would never choose unless I was completely out of everything else. And so the understanding the container concept was incredibly transformational for me. And because I was writing about what I was doing, not teaching anything in the beginning. It was so embarrassingly simple, you know, when I had this realization that I feel like if I wasn't writing about it, I might've thought, oh, everybody else knows this, right? Like, cause it is, it's the thing that naturally organized people naturally understand. And because I was writing about it, the people reading said, what? This changes everything for me too. And so understanding the realities of space and letting the space make those hard decisions about my stuff. Is incredibly freeing and is ultimately the thing that changed my home.
Juravich: Oh my goodness, the coffee mugs, you know, the battle is real, I swear they multiply without looking. Absolutely. This is All Sides on 89.7 NPR News and we're talking about decluttering and organizing with Dana K. White, creator of the No-Mess Decluttering Method and a decluttering expert. Listeners, do you need some spring cleaning advice or do you have a favorite cleaning tip to share? You can join us, 614-292-8513. That's 614-292-8513. Or send us an email at allsidesatwosu.org. One more tip from your top five. I'm not gonna give away all five. I'll make people go to your website to get five. But the one that I need you to explain to me. And I watched your video, but you're gonna explain it again. Store your food containers with the lids on. This is so controversial. And.
White: Until people try it.
Juravich: Okay, I'm with you because my container drawer is a disaster and it frustrates me.
White: Oh, absolutely. I, I have vivid memories of years of living with the fear of falling containers, like the fear, because I would literally open it up just a tiny bit and try to see what I was going to grab. And then I would open it really fast and grab what I needed and try to shut it before everything fell down on top of me, which is not really a functional way to right? That didn't actually work. So I always, back when I wasn't doing the dishes consistently, right? I constantly thought that I needed more food storage containers. I always needed more, how in the world could I get rid of any? But it also was not working. Like having them in this big pile was not work. When I would try to do detailed organizing, Which, you know, I'd have this moment where I'm like, I'm going to make this space great. It never actually lasted. Like it didn't have any lasting effect because I would stack and, you know, fit all these, you know bottom sides of the container and then the lids over here. Well, then finding the lid that went with the correct container and all of that ended up making it a huge mess because when I needed those items, I was never in that same zone that I was in when I was organizing it, right? Like organizing it that's all I'm doing right now. When I need a container. I'm like, oh my goodness, I'm so ready to be done in the kitchen. I've got to get the stuff put away and I just want to grab what I need. So I made this decision to store them with the lids on. You can keep so many, you can't keep near as many when you store them with the lid on, it is not possible, but it really changed things for me because when I stored it with the Lids on and I naturally therefore had fewer of these containers. Having fewer of the containers forced me to clean out the containers in my refrigerator more often because I would run out of containers and realize, oh, I need to check. Well, every time I did that, I would find things that were no good anymore and I would get them cleaned out. So it had this effect on my refrigerator as well, a positive functional effect. And if I restore them with the lids on, That means that the only thing I have to do in the moment when I need a container is open the cabinet and grab one thing in one handful. Like it's all together. And that is so much more functional for the way that I actually operate on an everyday basis. And because I can't keep as many and because they are all stacked on top of each other that way, it just naturally keeps that space under control. I no longer have the issue of things falling out whenever I open the door. I can just reach in and get it. And it's one of those times that really taught me. Having fewer things makes my house easier to manage. It removes stress, where I'd always thought I needed more. But having more actually caused so many of my function and stress problems.
Juravich: All right, it's gonna have to be a negotiation with other members of my house, but I wanna try to store the storage containers with the lids on. At least some of them. Yeah, try it on a few of them!
White: Of them. Yeah, try it on a few and that way you'll be able to grab what you need and see how much easier.
Juravich: It makes it. Yeah. This is All Sides on 89.7 NPR News. We're talking about decluttering and organizing with Dana K. White, creator of the No Mess Decluttering Method. And coming up, we're going to take listener calls and emails, and we're going to talk about Dana's other book that she has, which is called "How to Manage Your Home Without Losing Your Mind." That is when All Sides continues on 89.7 NPR News.
You're listening to All Sides. I'm your host, Amy Juravich. Spring is often called a season of renewal, but true renewal usually requires making some space. When our homes are crowded, our minds often follow suit. Today on All Sides, we're looking at that fine line between collecting and cluttering and offering a practical guide at reclaiming your home and your peace of mind. Still with us is Dana Kay White. Creator of the No-Mess Decluttering Method and a decluttering expert. Her books include "Organizing for the Rest of Us" and "Decluttering at the Speed of Life." Dana, thanks so much for being here today. Thanks for having me on.
Listeners, if you need some spring cleaning advice or you have a favorite cleaning tip you want to share, you can join us, 614-292-8513 or email us at allsidesatosu.org. So you have another book that's called "How to Manage Your Home Without Losing Your Mind," and that's a very on point title. What if you long for a more peaceful home but you're not ready to be a minimalist? Like you're a not a minimalist person. You like picture frames and you like little figurines. Like are all collections clutter?
White: Oh, absolutely not. I am not a minimalist. I do not consider myself one. It actually kind of gets on my nerves when people assume that because I teach decluttering, I must be teaching minimalism. And I don't. I actually consider myself a functionalist, meaning I want to be able to enjoy and use my home. Like I realized I had been held back from being able to do the creative things that I wanted to do. Because of my home, my home was holding me back. It was making everything harder to do. And so the container concept is the answer. Minimalism does not have to be the answer, right? Like the idea behind it, I am not a minimalist, excuse me, I'm not a minimalism expert. And so, but I do know that for people like me who really significantly struggle with clutter, that the idea of minimalism sounds right. And so we think tomorrow I am going to start on this minimalism journey. I don't need all this stuff. This is, I can do without it. And then we go and actually face our stuff and the space. And we think, well, I, can't get rid of that. I can't, get rid, of that and then it causes this grinding halt. We stop because we can't actually do anything. So the container concept, because we're intimidated by the idea of minimalism. So the, container concept says I can keep anything but I can't keep everything. And when I have that mindset of realizing the space I have is the space, I have if I want my house to function, to be able to have to be able to stand or control, I can keep more stuff than will fit functionally in my space. And then that lets me say, okay, I love these things, but there's only room for one. And so out of these two things or out of the seven things, Which one? Deserves space most. And then I give that, or which three deserves space, most. I'm not saying you can live with one coffee cup, so live with coffee cup. I'm saying, what's the shelf? What's the size of the space where I would look for coffee cups? And I'm gonna let that determine how many I can keep. So it keeps it from being these arbitrary decisions. And I get to acknowledge what I love and love what I live, but also not let that cause my house to be.
Juravich: Non-functional. We're going to take a call from Madeline in Columbus. Madeline, what's your question?
Madeline: My question is that it's the paper clutter. I have probably ADHD or something, and so I have to keep papers, but I'm not sure how to organize them in my file cabinet as far as like headings.
Juravich: All right, well, yeah, let's talk about paper clutter because there's, you know, there's from junk mail to needing to keep your taxes to do you need every receipt. There's different types of paper clutter.
White: There are, and I focus on decluttering as the way to get organized. Okay, so you mentioned ADHD. I am not a mental health professional, but many people on the internet have diagnosed me. So I will just say that I completely understand where you are, you're coming from and the overwhelm. The first thing I would say is to focus on decluttering. Okay, So what that means is take the one of the stacks of paper, the problem with paper is that it feels like everything is important because there are important things that come into your house on pieces of paper that do need to be kept. And so you, if you tend to procrastinate, which goes along with clutter, right? Like you bring in the mail and you think I don't have time right now to really analyze every last piece of mail. And, so I'm going to set it aside and I'll worry about it later. While then it piles and it piles, and it files. And now it feels like you have masses of important papers when in reality, a lot of it is actually trash or recycling. And so giving yourself permission, the first step of my five-step process is to look for trash. And so give yourself permission to just look through the paper and. Get rid of anything that is obviously trash or recycling. When I say trash, I mean recycling if you have it, right? But look for obvious trash. Look for things that are easy to go through because that will generally take a six inch pile down to a one inch pile, just by looking for the things that can go. Even important things. If they come in the envelope and you've never opened the envelope, sometimes it's not actually important. It came from somebody who sends important things, but this wasn't important. Or I don't know why they send extra pieces of paper. Like that drives me bananas, but just taking the envelopes out and the extra pieces of paper is gonna significantly reduce that. When that happens, you're going to feel less overwhelmed because now you're only dealing with a one inch stack. And you may have a bunch of other stacks that need to be gone through as well. But when it comes down to the actual filing, I highly recommend that you go with the least complicated system you can possibly go with. I actually am down to three categories. I have things that need to be acted upon right now, like a to-do file, things that I might need, like a coupon or something along those lines. And then I have the things that are important to save from this past year. And I know that that feels like it's too simple, but the first thing I would tell you to do is to start sorting new mail that's coming in into those three categories, or you could have five categories, that's fine, but start with new mail coming in because that's gonna be less overwhelming than dealing with the backlog of paper. And as you do that and as you start to see, Oh, okay. It's actually possible to have so many fewer categories than I thought I needed. Then going through those backlogs of paper is gonna be so much simpler because of the experience that you've gained on the.
Juravich: Of stuff coming in. Listeners, you can join us at 614-292-8513 or send us an email at allsides at wosu.org. I also wanted to ask you a little bit about laundry. Where do you put clothes that you've worn but they're not dirty, you plan to wear them again? Basically, how do I get rid of my clothes dumping chair? Yeah, exactly.
White: Um, I have a, um, a set of hooks on the back of my door, like my bathroom door. I think I've got one on my closet, my husband's closet. Like we have these spots and that is what works best for me, but I have to view it as a container because if I don't view it, as a container, then meaning a limited space, how many things can you fit on six hooks, right? Yeah. I can fit huge numbers of things. But once I fit that many on there, then it's completely non-functional. I have no idea what's there. And it's this huge project to then eventually take them all off and actually get them, you know, washed. But letting that like, I've got four hooks here. That means four is the limit. That is how many things I can have there, which then naturally, as something else needs to go on there, then I naturally, you know, remove something and realize, oh, this is ready to be hung up or it's ready for me to or honestly, I need to watch it.
Juravich: We got an email from Mary Jo and Mary Jo had a tip. She recommends tossing one thing a week or even better every trash day, have a bag, go to the basement, go to your closet, go somewhere in your house and fill it to try to get rid of the stuff. What do you think of that? I think that's great. Like I said, my first
White: is trash because trash is the least difficult thing it's the easiest of the easy stuff and I define easy stuff as anything that doesn't require a decision right like I already know what needs to be done so if you're doing this if you hear that tip and you think oh that means I've got to make decisions about things that other people tell me are trash but I don't believe it's trash don't even worry about that stuff to start by just saying, I am going to walk around with a trash bag or my recycling bin, and I am gonna throw away the stuff that I already know for sure is trash. There is something about doing that to get started with this low point of entry where you're not using any emotional energy that can make a huge visual impact. Another tip with that too, is to take a picture, then throw away obvious, easy trash that you already know is trash for five minutes. And then take another picture and see the impact of just doing that. And that is highly motivating to help you see other five minute periods here and there as, oh, hey, I could throw away trash for five minutes and make a real impact on my house.
Juravich: And you also recommend having a place in your house where you put stuff that you plan to donate. So you need like a donate spot. Now eventually you have to take it to the donation place, right? But it's good to have a spot because then it just doesn't sit. It has a destination.
White: Yes, absolutely. That was especially important as my kids were little. I have three kids, they're all in college now. But when I started this, what I call my de-slopification process, when I stated that they were three, five, and seven. So basically they grew up as I was figuring all this out and having a set place meant that we kind of shifted from thinking that you only got rid of stuff when you were in decluttering mode. Which is important to have moments like that, but to having a place where as soon as something doesn't fit, as soon something just isn't something I love anymore, I know exactly where to take it and my kids knew exactly where take it. And so that just shifted us into more of having a lifestyle of decluttering where it was normal to get rid of things and there was an established place for those things to go. So that we didn't have any barriers to getting stuff out easily.
Juravich: What what do you say is the difference between decluttering and organizing? Is there a difference between the two words? Actually, they're.
White: They are not the same thing. And thinking they are the same thing was a big part of my problem. When my house was a disaster. I would look around my house and think I have got to get organized. Organizing is problem solving. I would sit down and make a plan. I would try to figure out the future, how things were going to go, how we were going to use this space. And when I started, I was so overwhelmed, I felt like that I was I felt like I was giving up by saying, I don't even have it in me to organize right now. I'm just gonna declutter. But as soon as I said that, and I started focusing on only decluttering, my house started to change immediately, because you don't have to do anything first before you declutter, it's just getting stuff out of the house. And as soon I started decluttering my house became easier to keep under control. I was more able to use my space. I was less overwhelmed. And I realized decluttering and organizer are not the same thing. And thinking they are the same thing is often a big part of the problem when you feel overwhelmed by your space. Separating them out is freedom. And one of the reasons why I now say, hey, I teach decluttering, not organizing, but decluttering is how you get organized. The reason that I do that is I came to a point, you know, I always thought eventually I went to have the fancy color coded everything. But I got to the point where I got stuff out of my house, everything that I had, had a real space to live. And I realized, oh, this is what I wanted. I just didn't want to be held back by my house. And I achieved that through decluttering.
Juravich: You didn't all your all your socks didn't have to be balled in the same direction and all your t-shirts didn't Have to be color-coded, but they had to fit in the drawer, right?
White: Because my personality is not someone to actually maintain that. So it's easier for me to just have fewer socks that I can throw in the drawer. Sure, I could keep more if I did them all perfectly, but it's easy for me and my personality to have fewer.
Juravich: Can manage it. Unfortunately, we only have a minute left, but you do offer training for decluttering coaches. So is this when you feel like you need a little help and need a boost? You can hire a decluttering coach?
White: Yes, I was getting so many requests for me to personally help people. And because of the work that I do, that's just not something that I'm able to get into their houses. I do it on YouTube, but as far as all day, every day, I can't do that. So I started training decluttering coaches to lead people through my No Mess decluttering process. So they're all listed at declutteringcoaches.com and they understand the real struggles and they understood how to talk you through actually getting your house decluttered in a way that's respectful of you and what you want and lets you keep anything but not everything.
Juravich: We've been talking about decluttering and organizing two different things with Dana Kay White, creator of the No-Mess Decluttering Method and a decluttering expert. Dana, thank you so much for your time today.
White: Thank you. This is really fun.
And you've been listening to All Sides on 89.7 NPR News. If you missed any part of today's show, you can listen back at wosu.org/allsides. Subscribe to our podcast or every episode is available in the WOSU mobile app. This is 89.7 NPR News. I'm Amy Juravich.